Preschoolers’ Higher Order Executive Functions Through Embodied and Shared Computational Thinking With a Programming Toy

• In Event: Integrating Computational Thinking and Other Developmental and Learning Domains in Early Childhood

Abstract

Computational thinking (CT), defined as the systematic analysis, exploration, and testing of solutions rooted in computer science practices (Wing, 2011), is gaining recognition in early childhood education (ECE) as a means to foster children's interest in STEM (Bers, 2019). While its integration into ECE is promising, concerns have been raised that CT has not been fully aligned with children's foundational developmental domains, such as self-regulation (SR) and social-emotional learning (Wang & Proctor, 2022). Given the profound impact of SR on children's social adjustment and education outcomes (Rimm-Kaufman et al., 2009), it is important to examine the relationship between SR and CT. Existing research finds a positive association between CT and self-regulation, such as attention regulation, inhibitory control, and planning skills (e.g., Arfé et al., 2019; Arfé et al., 2020; Di Lieto et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2023), however, little is known about how embodied, and social interactional processes in CT activities can support young children’s self-regulation, especially higher-order executive functions (EF).

We examine how preschoolers engage in embodied and shared self-regulation through CT with a tangible programming toy in teacher-guided small groups to address this gap. Adapting Papert’s (1980) concepts of body/ego syntonicity and the phenomenologist Schutz’s notion of the “we-relationship”, we use a we-syntonicity framework (Wang et al., 2022) to make sense of preschoolers' embodied and shared regulatory processes in reasoning, a critical higher-order EF (Diamond, 2016).

Our study is part of a broader project investigating children's CT learning at a university-affiliated preschool in the US. The programming toy we used was Fisher-Price's "Think and Learn Code-a-pillar," which looks like a caterpillar with detachable body segments that can program the toy to move left, right, and straight, and participating children named it "Rapunzel." Children worked with Rapunzel in small groups once or twice a week (an average of 15 minutes per session) for over 12 weeks. Participants included 22 children aged 3-4 and two teachers. All sessions were video recorded, creating a corpus of about 15 hours. For this paper, we conducted multimodal microanalysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) of a subset of sessions of small groups learning "conditionals" (i.e., how Rapunzel's movement was affected by different surfaces, including blanket, carpet, and blocks).

Our analysis shows that preschoolers guided by their teacher actively engaged in deductive reasoning processes. They leveraged their body syntonicity: identification and resonance between Rapunzel and their “sense and knowledge about their own bodies” (Papert, 1980; p. 63) as well as their ego syntonicity: identification and resonance between Rapunzel and their “sense of self as people with intentions, goals, desires, likes, and dislikes” (p. 63) to deduce how difference surfaces affected Rapunzel’s movement. Their body/ego syntonicity with Rapunzel was mediated by the “attunement” (we-syntonicity) to each other's embodied exploration of Rapunzel's movement (e.g., touching/feeling the surface) and emotional responses to Rapunzel's triumph (e.g., reaching home) or challenges (e.g., getting stuck). Our findings challenge conventional perceptions of children's self-regulation as solely individualistic and mind-bounded and underscore how embodied and collaborative CT can support young children's self-regulation.

Authors

• X. Christine Wang, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Grace Yaxin Xing, University at Buffalo - SUNY